Bill Densmore is Vice President, Director & Co-Founder, CircLabs Inc. The following is an excerpt of his remarks delivered at the Federal Trade Commission’s “News Media Workshop” held on December 1 and 2, 2009.

The defining challenge for news organizations in the 21st century is no longer managing proprietary information, but helping the public manage our attention to ubiquitous information. In less than a decade, we have moved from a world of relative information scarcity -- access restricted by a variety of technical choke points -- such as presses -- to a world of such information abundance that the average user's challenge is not how to access information, or even how find it, but how to personalize and make sense of it.

The Internet as we know it today is not up to this task. To unleash a new user-driven attention economy, the next-generation Internet needs a common platform for sharing user identity, one which explicitly values and allows us to trade our privacy, and makes a market for digital information in the classic retail-wholesale model. In such a world, the new news organizations will thrive, but they will become convenors and aggregators as much as original content providers. They will have a new way to exchange value for information.

View Slides: Framework for a New News Ecology

This system . . . platform . . . clearing house . . . should uniformly exchange payments for the sharing of text, video, music, game plays, entertainment, advertising views, etc., across the Internet. It could, for example, manage background -- wholesale -- payments for content that is repurposed for advertising gain by bloggers, collecting, sorting and settling copyright and other value exchanges among users, publishers and aggregators.

A big idea

It's easy to think of this as too big an idea -- one which will require significant technology and infrastructure. That's true. To be compelling, the system must have solid technology, a structure that enables the new-media service economy, and a motivating mission and culture. It must be ubiquitous, yet never be owned or controlled by either the government or a dominant private, for-profit entity. It should to be massively distributed and — in some fashion — might ideally be collaboratively owned. It should ride on the existing web, and not interfere with it.

We have achieved this once. When the U.S. defense establishment developed the Internet, its goal was a massively distributed system that would withstand nuclear attack. Forty-some years later, it is the Internet’s design that itself has exploded our information culture more thoroughly than any feared warhead might. But while the system has succeeded beyond anyone’s imagination at opening up access to information, it has done little to enable the transfers of value to nuture and sustain that information. The Internet eliminates physical information product scarcity, becoming the perfect copy machine. As a result, the product-based models sustaining information creation crumble — first in music, now in newspapers, and possibly in books, magazines, video and music. What’s needed is a ubiquitous social network that enables consumers to share value for information services.

The attention economy

So we are now in the attention economy. In the attention economy users seek an experience which values their time and attention, providing them access to the information they need . . . from anywhere . . . quickly and easily. Before the Internet, this was a role served pretty well by daily ink on print. Today the product embodiment of that idea -- the newspaper is failing to keep up to the task. We are moving toward a new paradigm, part aggregator, part content creator, part social network and we are searching for a name for the service -- for lack of a better term, I've called it the information valet and it has been the focus of my research as a Donald W. Reynolds fellow at the Missouri School of Journalism over the last year -- and earlier, with the founding in 1994 of what has become Clickshare Service Corp., which I'm part owner of, and which has a potentially [ http://tinyurl.com/2wtlpu related patent.]

It also has lead to the creation, in a major equity partnership with the University of Missouri and with investment from The Associated Press, of a company called CircLabs Inc.. But there is a missing piece -- the need collaborative, transparent, non-profit ownership of needed clearing house for information transactions. My hope -- and I am speaking only for myself -- is that for a missing piece can be formed as something called the "Journalism Trust Association."

Journalism Trust Association

The mission of the Journalism Trust Association would be to help sustain, update and enrich the values and purposes of journalism through collaboration among news media, the public and public-focused institutions. JTA might be capitalized by major technology, publishing, advertising, consumer and philanthropic organizations. It which would guide the creation of new standards and a platform for exchange of user authentication and transaction records which enables a competitive market for information, respecting and enabling consumer privacy and choice.

Like common-gauge railroad tracks, interstate highways or standard, 60-cycle current, this platform should create a level playing field for the things sought by speakers yesterday (Dec. 1):

• The "gold-standard" measurement of user-access to web resources sought yesterday by Scripps newspaper executive Mark Contreras.
• The opportunity (but not the requirement) to charge for content sought by News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch.
• The user-controlled personalized advertising which will allow Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post to thrive without charging.
• And the accountability to users for their privacy sought by the Center for Digital Democracy's Jeff Chester.

To make a new market for digital information -- and attention -- we need to start creating a unique ownership and governance framework, assembling the required technology, and assessing the impact on law, regulation, advertising and privacy. If you'd like to help build this idea to reality, please contact me.